Since this blog pretty much isn´t used anymore, and since all I do is delete the occasional spam comment, I decided to close comments for all posts.

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A few days ago, iPSX (App Store link) ($1.99 now, $2.99 after introduction sale) was released in the app store and today the first update went live, along with the release of a competing application, iTrade (App Store link) (free). Both applications allow you to play a stock trading game. The game is realistic in that you ‘trade’ in stocks that are available on the US markets and the prices you can buy/sell them at are at almost real time. They will be a few minutes behind due to financial reasons (it costs a lot of money to show real time quotes) but the prices they stocks are bought/sold at are current prices. But it’s also a fantasy game, since you play with imaginary money. iPSX gives you a portfolio of $10,000,000, iTrade gives you $100,000 and you try to make that into as much as you can.

In this article I will compare the versions of these games that are out on May 1st, 2009 (this includes the first iPSX update, and the release version of iTrade). Where possible, I will mention the plans of the developers to improve their game.

First of all…

First of all, the article won’t in-deep discuss the occasional crashes that are experienced with iPSX (I’m positive the developer will fix them, both developers seem to be dedicated to making their app as best as possible). There’s also the fact that you need to have a WiFi connection to do anything in iTrade (iPSX allows you to view the portfolio offline, I hope iTrade will implement this as well), and the fact that iPSX currently only allows you to trade during 9:30-16:00 in the timezone you’re currently in (they will change/fix this ASAP). Additionaly, while iTrade is free to download, it is supported by advertisements. These things should be mentioned to be fair to both applications.

Also, I want to mention that I feel invested in both applications. I paid $1,99 for iPSX which means that I hope for this application to be as good as possible, to have as much value for my money as possible. Also, I had e-mail contact with one of the iTrade developers and he truely invests in personal customer relations. We’ve sent page-long e-mails back and forth, so that must have cost him valuable time. That makes me wish them the best, I hope for them that iTrade will do very well. This review won’t conclude with a verdict, it’s simply written to show you the differences in design.

And finally, before starting the comparison: luckily for me, iPSX uses a light grey background, while the backgrounds in iTrade are black. That makes it easy to recognize which screenshots belong to which application. Also, in general the iPSX screenshots will be at the left and the iTrade screenshots will be at the right, except for when two iPSX screenshots are displayed side by side (then the iTrade screenshot will be below them).

Portfolio

Both applications have a fairly similar layout. Tabs on the bottom, which you can tap to change views in the rest of the screen. The first tab is the Portfolio tab.

The Portfolio tab in iPSX shows you the amount of cash you have and them amount of money your shares are worth. These two combined determine your net worth. As soon as the pending transactions (at the bottom of the screen) are processed, my Cash will go down and my Shares will go up. Depending on how the stock value will change over the next day, my net value will be below or above €10,000,000.00. At the top of the screen you can tap the “Graph” button to see how you’ve been doing. Since I just put a few transactions in my queue and the market hasn’t been open yet, nothing has happened to my stocks, so there is no performance to display right now.

iTrade shows you the amount of cash as well, this time in red, because for every transaction you have to pay a $10 fee. So as long as I don’t earn that back, my net worth will be below $100,000. The amount of cash is displayed as well, in green (because it’s above $0 obviously). The worth of my stocks is also displayed, but at a different location: iTrade shows you a header for pending transactions and currently owned stocks, and in this header it will show you the worth of the stocks under that header. You can quickly buy more stocks from under the Pending Transactions header or cancel your order. The “My Stocks” header is still empty because the market is still closed and my transactions aren’t processed yet. iTrade also shows you a graph of your performace. The advantage is that you don’t have to tap a button in order to see that graph, but on the other hand you can’t zoom in on the graph to see it in as much detail as the iPSX graph.

As you can see, the iTrade screen displays more information than iPSX does, iPSX is easier on the eyes because of the larger fonts.

Finding and keeping track of stocks

Before buying stocks, you’ll have to search for them. iPSX uses an online database to search stocks, so you have to enter a few characters in order to get a list of matching stocks/symbols. iTrade, on the other hand, has a database of available stocks included in the application. Obviously, since not many people will know the names of all available stocks, you may not know what to search for in iPSX. The iTrade approach is better, and after some TouchArcade.com forum members told this to the iPSX developers, they agreed to implement a stock database in a future update.

Now if you’ve found some stocks you’re interested in, you can purchase them. We’ll discuss that later. But it’s also possible that you want to keep track of stocks without purchasing them, so iPSX allows you to put them on your Watch List. You can track your desired selection of stocks so you can buy them when they’re at a good price.

iTrade doesn’t have a feature like this, unfortunately. In order to keep track of a stock you either have to purchase it, or you have to look it up in the stock database every time you want to check on it. What iTrade does have (and iPSX doesn’t) is a list of Hot Stocks, which highlights some stocks to give you a suggestion of what you could look in to. (iTrade developers make clear in their legal documents that none of their statements should be seen as suggestions on which stocks to buy).

Viewing and purchasing stocks

So, you’ve found a stock you’re interested in. Obviously since you’re using an iPhone or iPod Touch (let’s call it an iDevice) you’ll probably want to take a look at the Apple stock, with the symbol AAPL.

iPSX shows you when you added it to your watching list, and how much it changed in percentage and in price (I assume this is the change since you added it to your watching list). Then below that, the most recent data for the stock is displayed. You see the current price, and the change from the opening price (again, in price and percentage). The highest and lowest prices for that day and the last year are displayed (you can scroll the screen down a bit). From this screen, you can buy a stock, sell it (if you own it) and add it to your watching list (if it’s not on there already and you reached this page from searching for the stock). Using the buttons at the top of the screen, you can see the news related to that stock (see the screenshots at the end of this chapter) and the graph for that stock. You can choose to view the changes for the last day, five days, three months, year and five years.

iTrade shows you pretty much the same information, but it has the graph already on the screen. (Again, while you don’t have to press an additional button to see it, you can’t view it full screen.) You can easily see if the stock is doing well (displayed in green or red, at the left above the graph) and the additional information at the top right speaks for itself. As with iPSX you can buy or sell from this screen, or access the news.

The news screens are pretty similar in that they provide headlines and link to full articles. However, at the time of taking the screenshots, iTrade has more recent news even though the screenshot was taken two minutes earlier than the iPSX screenshot. If you look at the date stamps, iPSX doesn’t have articles from May 1st yet. On the other hand, the title of the top article in iPSX (“Motorola rings up wider loss”) is also the first line in the first article in iTrade.

Competing with other traders

Of course you can buy and sell stocks for your own pleasure, or to practise for really trading on the actual market. But you can also view how other players are doing.

In iPSX you can view a list of the top 10 best players and view their stats. Also, you can join team and participate in clan wars between various review sites. At the time of writing this review, the clan wars were still about to start so there is no data yet.

In iTrade the displayed stats on the highscore list are more detailed, and you can also view more stats by clicinkg at a trader. There are stats for this month and last month, because iTrade will reset your portfolio at the start of every month (more on that below). You can also view the overall stats. iTrade doesn’t have something like Clan Wars yet, but they’ll start with investment clubs in the future. At this moment I don’t have details about how that will work.

Settings

Both games allow you to change some account related settings. iTrade also lets you pick your team for the clan wars, and you can opt in to be displayed in the highscores (Movile 10) if you want. iPSX is less server-based than iTrade so you don’t have to log in to an account in order to play. iTrade does need you to create an account, which you can do from within the game before starting to play. Changing your account info or even terminating the account is also possible from within the app.

Furthermore, iTrade has a “News” tab where posts from the developer can be displayed. While I really commend the developers for implementing this way to keep their customers informed, I don’t think I’ll visit it often (depending on how often it will be updated, of course). As you can see, half of this screen is filled with ads. (There is also an advertisement on the Scores tab.)

Resetting your portfolio

This is where both applications are very different. In iPSX, you’re given $10,000,000 and the developers normally won’t take that away for you. Only if players find a way to cheat, an update that fixes this will reset your account. But in principe, you’ve got the control over your own account: from the Settings screen you’re able to access a large red button that let’s you reset your portfolio. This will remove all your stocks, and give you a fresh $10,000,000 to start with.

iTrade, on the other hand, gives you $100,000 to play with at the end of each month, and takes it away again when the month ends. They then send an e-mail about the winners, and start over at the first day of the next month. As a player you can’t reset the portfolio yourself, if you want to start over you’ll have to wait until the first day of the next month.

There are (dis)advantages to both approaches. In iPSX you’ll be able to watch your stocks over a longer time. You could own stocks for months if the developers don’t have an urgent reason to reset the portfolios. However, this also means that new players can have trouble getting into the highscores if they are dominated by long time players.
iTrade gives everyone a new chance at the start of each month, but you won’t be able to hold on to your stock for more than 31 days.

Concluding

As you’ve seen, both games are very similar in basic functionality. Some differences have been highlighted in this review, they will probably determine which game you’re going to get.

Let me list the most important ones again for easy reference, and add two items that haven’t been mentioned in the rest of this comparison:

• iPSX is $1.99 for now and will go up to $2.99, iTrade starts out as a free but ad supported application. If needed, iTrade could become a paid application if that’s needed to pay for monthly costs to keep the service and game running.
• The iPSX screens are in general easier on the eyes and lets you view graphs full screen, but iTrade shows more information on the screens (including the graphs, but smaller).
• Both applications will have a database of available stocks in the game; iTrade already has this but for now you have to enter search terms to find a stock in iPSX.
• iPSX allows you to put stocks on your Watch List, iTrade shows you a selection of stocks on the Hot Stocks screen.
• Both games let you view a list of top traders, and view more info on how they’ve been playing. However, iPSX already allows you to play in teams (clan wars), iTrade will have a similar feature in the future.
• iPSX doesn’t require you to create an account in order to play, iTrade does.
• iPSX generally doesn’t reset your portfolio but allows players to do that themselves. iTrade resets your portfolio each month but doesn’t allow players to do so themselves.
• iTrade informs users about news and announcements through an in-game “News” tab.
• iPSX will grow to have multiple markets from all over the world in future versions. This means that people from Europe, Asia, Australia etc. will also have markets to trade on at times that are convenient to them. This eliminates the issue that people in some parts of the world will have trouble playing on the US market, since trading hours (9:30-16:00 Eastern Time) can be during night hours in their timezone.
• iTrade charges a virtual $10 fee on each purchase and limits the amount of transactions to 50 each day.

Four years ago I had to pick a study, and I chose to study Law at the University of Utrecht. I had a lot of fun with my fellow students, but in the last year I realized that this wasn’t going to be something I’d like to work with. I didn’t even look forward to finding a job. So, I decided to give space to a thought that has always been in the back of my head. I’ve been thinking I would like to be a elementary school teacher for a long time, but I never really considered it because of two reasons. The first reason was that I didn’t think I was capable for it, I never worked with children and didn’t think I would be good at it. The other reason was that there’s some kind of social pressure that if you can, you should do the best study you can. Working with the Law can generate better paychecks and of course there’s the Masters degree. However, I realised that I wasn’t going to have the satisfaction in that field of work, that I do think I will find when teaching children.

So since early September I started on the Hogeschool Domstad (also in Utrecht), and I find that I’m having less time for Pocket PC related things. So as a logical consequence, I can no longer post reviews that take a few hours to write.’

I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the blog though, for two reasons. First of all, I wouldn’t want to close down a site that some people still find useful for the reviews and articles that are available at this moment. Second, there’s the chance that I’ll want to write an occiasional review. I think that I will just decide at that moment wether to post it here or ask one of the kind folks at SolSie.com, MyTodayScreen.com or JustAnotherMobileMonday.com if they’d like to publish my review.

I’m sure I’ll see some of you around, wether it is on the SBSH forums, one of the blogs I mentioned above, the SBSH, Astraware, Mastersoft, Ilium or eSoft Interactive beta teams, or somewhere else. :)

Bratislava, Slovakia

Resco Bubbles is an action puzzle game where the idea is to clear the grid of bubbles in order to advance to the next level. You are given a sequence of bubbles, which should be quickly and efficiently popped. Numerous explosive, speed-up, slow-down and damage bubbles keep the game play exciting and challenging.

Features:

• G-sensor support
• 30 challenging levels
• various surfaces
• calibration
• best score
• realistic ball-bounce feeling

In this review I’ll be taking a look at ceTwit 2.0, assuming that you are familiar with Twitter. If you are not, you might want to check out the microblogging website/tool www.twitter.com or read about it here. (The only way to truly get to know it, though, is by actively getting involved). Reading a review about a Twitter client doesn’t really make sense if you’re not a Twitter user, so I’m assuming that people who read on after the break will be familiar with the terms “follow”, “@reply”, “direct message”, “favorite” and maybe even “retweet” and other services like Ping.fm and TwitPic. (The latter three will be briefly explained though).

I’m not going to bother with writing an entire section about downloading, installing and registering the application. ceTwit can be downloaded HERE, after which you’ll have to move the .cab file to your device. Install it, and start it. Since it’s free, there’s no need to register.

Getting Tweets, direct messages and @replies to your device

Directly after starting ceTwit, your screen might not be so interesting. In order to download your personal timeline (tweets, DM’s and @replies) onto your device, you’ll first have to enter your account details. Go to Menu > Settings > Account/Net, and fill out your username and password. From now on, ceTwit knows where to get your timeline from.

But there is more – ceTwit doesn’t just sit on your device waiting for you to refresh it. Well it can do that, if you want to keep control over how much data you use. However, you can also make sure that when you start ceTwit, it will immediately connect to your network and start downloading the 20 most recent tweets from the people you follow, along with the 20 most recent @replies directed to you and your 20 latest incoming Direct Messages. The next setting (Refresh Interval) can be set to determine how often ceTwit will try to update, but only if Auto Refresh is enabled (Menu > Settings > Auto Refresh). So in order to keep your data usage under control, just disable “Auto Refresh on start”, “Connect on Start” and “Auto Refresh”. If you’re not concerned with data usage and just want to always be able to read up on your timeline, enable these settings and specify your desired refresh interval.

So now you may have ceTwit set to constantly keep your timeline up to date. But if you need an instant refresh, just go to Menu > Refresh. Then wait while ceTwit requests your timeline, and voila, it will appear on the screen.

Displaying tweets in ceTwit and getting notified about new items

At the top of the screen, in the title, bar, you can see when ceTwit was last updated. If there has been an unsuccesfull attempt to update, the time will have an exlamation mark after it. This way you can always see if indeed the tweet at the top of the list is also really the latest tweet that you should be able to read.

Then below that, you’ll see the actual tweets. You can customize if you want to see avatars or not (disable them to reduce data usage) and also the height of each tweet can be tweaker. I like my tweets with a height of 53 because this makes 5 tweets exactly fit on the screen at once. There is a risk that comes with this though, and that is that a tweet is longer than the 4 lines that can be displayed in those 53 vertical pixels. To find out if this is the case, just press the center button of your D-Pad. This will zoom in to the selected tweet and display it in larger font, filling almost the entire screen. The entire message will fit now. And as a bonus you can press up/down to move through your timeline, so this zoomed view may be a good way to read up on Tweets if the normal view is too tiny and crowded for you!

Navigating in the regular view is even easier. The up/down buttons still work, and there is also a scrollbar at the side of the screen. However, pressing left or right will PageUp/PageDown the screen, moving through 5 tweets at the time (depending on how many tweets you show on one screen normally). And if you’ve read through all your tweets and find yourself at the bottom of your list, simply go to the Menu and select the second item “Jump to top” in order to go back to the top of your list. I guess the developer himself got tired of scrolling back up every time. :-) By the way, if you do scroll down to the total bottom, you’ll see that after the regular tweets, your 20 most recent @replies and direct messages are displayed in ceTwit as well. You can also limit your view to only show @replies or direct messages by going to Menu > Timeline and selecting what you want to see.

As said, you can enable/disable the avatars and change the height of the tweets. You can do this by going to Menu > Theme/Notification.

On the first tab you can change the colors for regular tweets (even and odd), @replies and direct messages. If you give @replies and direct messages colors that vary a lot from your regular tweets, you’ll be able to easily spot them and reply to them asap.

The second tab has the layout options, which I prefer to keep at the default settings. They speak for themselve I think: you can change the height of each tweet and the font size of the text in the regular view. Additionaly you can choose to enable or disable the display of timestamps. I keep them both enabled because avatars make me recognize the identity of the tweeter faster and timestamps give me a general idea of when someone posted something. (Of course timezone differences are a common problem at Twitter and ceTwit can’t do anything about this. If I post something at 23:00 before going to sleep, it will be morning in another place, and timestamps like “1 hour ago” don’t make that clear to people who read my tweets.)

Notifications allow you to be, well, notified when new items are received in your Twitter timeline. You can enable a vibration and a (custom) sound. If you only enable the vibration, your device can give you a silent notification on new tweets while keeping the screen off. Sounds will power on the screen so that you can immediately read the Tweets. Personally I would prefer integration with the built-in Notifications (in Start > Settings > Sounds and Notifications), because then I can also get a popup message on my screen and LED notifications. Another wish is to get notified only on new DM’s and @replies and during development the developer expressed his plans to implement this in the future.

Additional items from the Settings menu

Before moving on, I’d like to get the Settings menu over with. We’ve discussed the most important items (Auto Refresh, Account/Net and Theme/Notification), so only three are left, and you’ll hardly use them. “Last Comm” shows you the actual .xml ceTwit requests from Twitter and which is used to to fill your timeline.

The Rate Limit is something you might not even be aware of. Twitter allows external applications/services to send/request information to/from Twitter a limited amount of times each hour. Currently this is set to 100 (so almost every 30 seconds) but in the past Twitter has limited this to 20 when there was heavy pressure on the service. Twitter decided to reduce the load of 3rd party apps/services in order to keep Twitter running. In such cases, you can check the rate limit and see how many hits you’ve got left this hour. (Note that if you’ve also got a desktop application such as Thwirl running, that application will also count towards your rate limit. So updating ceTwit every 3 minutes (20 times in an hour) leaves 80 for other services/apps.)

Finally “About” shows you the version of ceTwit you are running and when it was released, along with some usage tips. Additionaly, you can download updates directly from your device through Menu > Check for upgrade.

Performing actions on tweets in your timeline

ceTwit has a popup menu with several actions that you can perform in relation to your tweets. This popup menu can be opened in three ways. First, you can tap-and-hold on a tweet with your stylus. Second, you can select the ”Action” item from the Menu. And third, if you press the Right D-Pad button for a while (just a bit longer than you would to PageDown), the menu will open as well.

From top to bottom, you can:
Reply to the person who sent the tweet you selected when opening the popup menu.
Send that person a direct message.
If the tweet contains a link to a website you can open it.
You can mark the post as your favourite (or remove the favourite mark).
You can follow or unfollow a person (just enter the username in the dedicated textbox).
You can use Skweezer to view a mobile-friendly version of the mentioned website, view the profile of the user in your browser, or view the conversation on Quotably.
You can Retweet a tweet. This is when you want to share someone else’s tweet and basically just want to copy it to your own outgoing tweets. You do get control over the message before it is being sent so you can personalize it or add your comment.
You can copy the tweet to the clipboard so that you can past it in, for example, an e-mail or a word document.
And if you’ve selected a tweet of your own, you can even delete it. This has already helped me in a number of occasions, for example when I accidentaly pressed the “Update” softkey when I hadn’t finished writing my tweet yet.
Finally, Cancel will close the popup menu again, but pressing the Left D-Pad button will do that as well.

Sending tweets yourself, ping.fm and Twitpic support

It’s about time we get to send a tweet ourselves, isn’t it? Sending an update is a core part of using Twitter but there’s just so much to cover in ceTwit that we didn’t get a chance to look at this part of the application earlier. But now we do. In the “Status” menu (right softkey), there are three items: Twitter, TwitPic and Ping.fm. Let’s first get started with regular updates, over Twitter.

It’s quite easy actually. Just select Twitter from the Update menu in the regular view to be presented the Status Update screen. You simply get to type your message while seeing the character count getting closer to zero. When you’re done, press “Update”. ceTwit will then automatically send your update to Twitter and return to the regular timeline view where it will show your new tweet at the top of the list. That’s hard to beat, isn’t it?!

So ceTwit also supports TwitPic and Ping.fm. But what do these services actually do to improve my Twitter experience?

TwitPic is one of the services that allows you to attach an image to your Tweet. If you update through TwitPic, you can enter your Tweet and attach a photograph through Menu > Attach Pic (ceTwit will remember your most recently used folder). Your message will be followed by a link which leads to your image. Sign in to TwitPic.com with your Twitter username/password to have control over your images.

Ping.fm is descrived by the ceTwit developer in his ceTwit FAQ HERE. It says:

Ping.fm is a service that allows updating multiple social networks via one post. Setting up ping.fm in ceTwit for instance will allow you to post to plurk, twitter, facebook, jaiku etc…. all with one status update message. In order to get this working you’ll need to enter your ping.fm users key into ceTwit’s Accounts settings.

The easiest way to do this (because the key is ridiculously long) is to visit http://ping.fm/key from pocket internet explorer and select and copy the key from the page and then paste it into ceTwit’s Account settings screen.

So if you plan to use any of these services, ceTwit has you covered. I’ll show the screens of the TwitPic and Ping.fm update sections below, but they pretty much speak for themselves.

Conclusion

There’s no reason to hide it, I’m a fan of ceTwit. I was lucky enough to stumble on ceTwit 1.4 exactly when the developer was going to work on ceTwit 2.0. So I started to follow him on Twitter and tested the beta versions, sending him bug reports and suggestions along the way. Because of that, I was able to get a few of my wishes in ceTwit and discuss the implementation of other features. Some of them are still in the works. For example, a collaboration with the author of TwitToday is in the works which probably allow you to see the amount of unread tweets/@replies/dm’s on your today screen!
Because of how Twitter works I could also check out some of the other betatesters and learn how they thought about the beta development. However, the developer opened a Google Group for ceTwit feedback recently to allow for a more community-like discussion.

ceTwit offers a very complete Twitter experience on the Pocket PC. It’s free, so you only have to worry about charges from your carrier for your data usage. I’ve tried several other mobile Twitter applications but haven’t found one that could keep me away from ceTwit. And frankly, I have no reason to look for an alternative anymore!

Get your copy at the kosertech website or click here for the ceTwit 2.0 product page!

Winterface

I have to say that I’m not using any of the Touch Screen “mobile shell” applications that are currently available, but after the release of Winterface it has generated quite some excitement. So therefore I think people will be glad to know that a new version (v1.1) has been released by Vito Technology.

Winterface to win your hearts

New version with numerous improvements

            August 13th, 2008 – VITO Technology releases a new version of one of its best-sellers – Winterfcae. Winterface is a Windows Mobile shell that helps you to organize applications and settings at your PocketPC the way you like. The start gesture “rainbow” was replaced in new version by upside down tick ^. Moreover, it has become possible to add to the main screen not only applications, settings and contacts but also any files on your Pocket PC. Besides, calendar and tasks now can notify you about upcoming events, appointments and tasks. Minor bugs have been also fixed.
          The new version 1.1 of Winterface includes numerous improvements. The major one is that we’ve changed the start gesture, now the application is started with the help of the upside down tick ^. This gesture is unlikely to interfere with other applications so that Winterface couldn’t pop out each time you slide the screen. Drawing the gesture “tick” or letter “v” on your screen can close any application you are working in.
Other improvements are concerned with tasks and calendar. For most of users their Pocket PCs are organizers and reminders. Therefore Winterface now have red indicators with numbers above Calendar and Tasks icons to show active tasks and upcoming events. When tapping Calender you can see a semi-transparent window with all events. If you need to edit time or event you can go to the calendar if not you may return back to the screen. As for the tasks, pressing the icon you are put straight to the Tasks to look at them and to edit.  
At one of the sites where we had great discussion with our users we were strongly convinced by the advanced WM users that they definitely need quick access to separate files. Therefore “Files” was added to the menu of the program that affords you to add any file to the screen. Moreover, we’ve made a possibility to switch off the lock screen.
Winterface now looks whiter as most of the standard icons were replaced by super stylish winter-like icons. You will be amazed by the cool looks of your Pocket PC screen.
Some of the bugs were fixed like: it is now impossible to delete Menu and Running icons of the program, some of the icons are not doubled any more (like Phone). The bug on HTC devices with battery icon was also fixed.   

NOTE! If you need to backup your settings, you only should rename file pages.db (for example, pages_old.db) in the Winterface folder. Then you should uninstall the old version of Winterface, rename it back from pages_old.db  to pages.db after that install new version of the program. All other updates that are higher than version 1.1 won’t need this operation as the program will do it itself.

Winterface is available for $19.95 at www.iWindowsMobile.com/vito-mobile-shell.html.

VITO Technology Inc. is known for its high-tech products in the field of Windows Mobile and Symbian software, GPS navigation and custom projects. Introduced in the present article Winterface is a mobile shell for Windows Mobile.

So today we’ll be taking a look at Resco Sudoku Touch (which I will abbreviate with RST for the rest of the review). We will see how accurate the controls are, which Sudoku-specific features are offered, and how the looks of RST can be customized.

Menu items

Starting up RST immediately gives you a rich and classy looking menu screen with only a few items in it. Most importantly is a wheel with the four difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard and expert). Simply swipe your finger across the screen to slide through these menu items and press Go to start playing. This is ”menu-navigation done right”, since you don’t have to navigate through various screens to start playing a puzzle. Even better, if you’ve stopped playing a game in the past, the very first (and easiest to select) menu item is Continue, which you can use to almost instantly continue a previously started game of Sudoku.

The last two items on the wheel are Enter Own, which allows you to enter your own Sudoku puzzles (for example to solve the puzzle from the newspaper on your device) and Choose Wallpaper. The classic version of Resco Sudoku allowed for a very high degree of customizability, but that has been limited in this Touch friendly version. Right now you can only pick from a set of included wallpapers but they are different enough to provide probably anyone with a satisfying background while playing Sudoku.

While the ability to enter custom puzzles can be very important for people who are looking for a new Sudoku game for the Pocket PC, this feature doesn’t set RST apart from it’s competitors. So let’s just move on to the game screen.

Entering numbers

Most of the in-game screen consists of, naturally, the Sudoku game board 0f 9×9=81 squares. Some numbers are already filled in, and you have to complete the rest of the puzzle following the Sudoku rules which are probably well known for everyone by now. (If they aren’t, I recommend this Wikipedia entry which explains the most important techniques). But where most of the Sudoku games also have number pads on the screen to allow the player to enter digits, RST just has a small top bar with a highscore and the current playing time, and a scrollbar (consisting of two sections) giving you access to most important game features. Entering numbers, however, is done in a quite different way. While the 81 squares may look too small to tap with your finger, I’ve never missed the square I wanted to tap in the several puzzles I completed. Tapping one of the (empty) squares brings up the input panel. (Note that it doesn’t just appear, it comes in with a nice animation. Animations are scattered through the application and appear everywhere – when navigating though menu’s, when changing settings, etc.) The input panel has the numbers 1-9 in large boxes, so tapping the right one is even easier than on the 9×9 playing field. If you tap a number it gets highlighted and the box is filled with that number. If you’ve accidentaly entered an incorrect number you can just tap it again to remove the highlight (and delete the number from the box in the playing field).

But what about pencil marks, you ask? Well, I need those too. While easy puzzles can sometimes be solved faster without pencil marks, they are often key to solving more difficult puzzles. To enter them into your playing field, simply slide the slider in the input panel to the right. Then, if you tap a number, it will be inserted as a little pencil mark.

A nice addition to the game is that you can see the properties of a number by it’s color. The numbers that some of the fields have been prepopulated with are in black. They can’t be removed and you know that they are correct. Numbers you enter are displayed in dark blue. However, once you’ve filled in all nine 1′s, they will fade out. So the black 1′s will turn grey and the dark blue ones will turn light blue. This helps you identify the numbers you still need to work on. In the example below to the right, if we look at the 3×3 square at the top left, we see that all 1′s, 2′s, 7′s and 3′s have been filled out. Therefore, only the 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 need your attention. I think this is a smart addition since it ‘fixes’ an issue I have when solving sudoku’s on paper: I often go number by number and check each column to see if they’re there already. For example, in the screenshot below to the right, look at the columns in the middle (with 4,2,3 at the top). You see that 8 is in the center column, and a little lower you see that it is also in the column to the right. Therefore in the bottom box the 8 has to go in one of the three fields on the left (in this case, the top left one of the box in the bottom middle, the left one with the pencil marks). Fading out the numbers I’ve solved already makes it easier to see for which numbers I have to follow this procedure.

Solving a puzzle will give you the Information screen that can also be accessed from the [I] icon on the toolbar in the bottom. It shows you that you’ve finished the game and how many time you’ve used, along with your best and average statistics. If you haven’t finished the puzzle yet, tapping the [I] icon will show you your progress by notifying you of any errors made. For example, entering a number that is already present in a box will display “SOME VALUES ARE DUPLICATED! One or more rows, columns or blocks contain the same digit twice.” This is a subtle way of error detection since it doesn’t immediately flag the incorrect number.

The toolbar

We’ve already seen one of the screens that can be accessed from the toolbar, but there is obviously more to discuss. The home icon simply takes you back to the beginning screen, while solving your current game. You can always go back to the game you were playing by choosing “Continue” from the beginning screen.

Then there is the Information icon which shows you the status screen we’ve discussed in the previous section.

Next up is the screen you can see below, which is accessed by tapping the third button on the toolbar. You can save your game state, which will make a checkpoint in your gameplay. You can then try some possible moves, and if they don’t work for you, you can simply go back to the saved game state and try some other possibilities. (That’s what the Restore Game State is for, obviously ;-).) I don’t think this is a very important feature since Sudoku’s should be able to be solved without guessing. So if you’re at a point where you want to use this Save Game State feature, you’ve probably missed the next logical step that can be done to progress in the puzzle.
Also available from this screen is a Flag mistakes and Auto Marks option, which will be discussed in the next section. Finally you can ask for a Hint here, let RST solve your puzzle (please don’t do that, what’s the fun of it?) or restart the puzzle if you think you’ve been wasting your time making too many errors in your current game.

After these three buttons there are two small arrows. Tap them to move to the second section of the toolbar. Most of the features that are offered here are not new, the first three are the Save, Restore and Hint items that can also be seen in the previously discussed screen, However, some people might prefer to access them from the toolbar instead of from an additional popup screen. Whatever suits the player best. :-)
The last item is an Undo arrow which can make your latest moves undone.

In a way, I like the toolbar a lot. It’s simple to use and it’s graphically attractive. However, I think that if Resco didn’t duplicate the Save, Restore and Hint feature, they could have placed the Undo button on the first toolbar. This would eliminate the need to switch between two toolbars and it makes asking for a hint a bit more difficult because you need to open a new screen for it.

Auto marks, hints and flagging mistakes

There are three features which could be accessed from the toolbar (from the previous section) that I wanted to bring out a bit more.

The first is the Auto marks, which instantly fills the entire screen with pencil marks for every number that can possibly go into a field. This makes it easy, as you can see in the top right corner of the left-most screenshot below, to fill out some of the fields right away. I do consider this as cheating though, since you can also manually fill out the pencil marks and the only reason to let RST do this automatically is to save time. On the other hand, filling out those pencil marks can take lots of time, and if you don’t care too much about the highscores you can save yourself the trouble of going through almost 81 boxes to see which numbers can possibly go into each and every one of those boxes.

Next up is the Hint feature, which is implemented very well. It will give you step-by-step hints, starting with just highlightin a block in blue. (Here you can see that only the 5 and 7 are missing, and their correct positions can both be determined from the 5 in the second row and the 7 in the third row, and from the 5 in the 5th column and the 7 in the 6th column.) If you tap the Hints button a few times the hints will get more specific and eventually it will just enter a correct number in a correct spot.

Finally there is the Flag Mistakes settings which, when enabled, marks your mistakes in red (in the example below, the 8 appears twice in the center block on the right). This is defenitely cheating, because when you’d fill out a Sudoku puzzle on paper you’d only find out about your mistakes later in the game when you have two identical numbers in one block, row or column. Indicating errors immediately when they are made should only be used by beginning Sudoku players who can then immediately learn from their mistakes and try to investigate why that certain move was illegal.

Conclusion

So, the final verdict. Being a newcomer in the Sudoku market is not easy. (Even though RST is 4 months old it’s certainly one of the newest players.) If you’ve gotten used to a Sudoku game in the past there might be features you will miss in RST. For example, I like that in Astraware Sudoku you can play level packs, which gives you more goals to solve. It lets you download Sudoku of the day puzzles which gives you daily assignments. These are not present in Resco Sudoku Touch, which is much more about playing individual puzzles whenever you feel like it. (Except for the Best and Average time highscores.) The beginning screen is designed for that by enabling you to start a game almost instantly.

In my opinion Resco delivers a Sudoku game with gorgeous looks and a finger-friendly input method that can hardly be improved upon. If you’re in the market for a Pocket PC Sudoku game you will want to try several alternatives to see which one has most of the features you are looking for. However, in the current days of finger-friendliness and cloning parts of the iPhone layout, Resco Sudoku Touch is an implemention you will want to include in your list of trials.

It may not have the skinnability that Resco Sudoku Classic has, or some of the extra’s that come with other Sudoku games, but it has the basics (hints, auto pencil marks, undo, flag mistakes) and even fades out numbers you’ve finished. For me this is more than I typically use when playing Sudoku, so it very sufficient. And with the easy input method, I expect that it will be my game of choice to play Sudoku puzzles on during the holidays.

Name: Resco Sudoku Touch
Version: 1.00
Developed by: Resco
Price: $19,95, or $24,74 including Resco Sudoku Classic, or $27,42 as part of the Resco Touch Suite including Resco Diamonds and Resco Brain Games ( the latest is reviewed here).
Download a trial: here.

Motogear is the mobile version of Elastomania and is a motorbike simulation game. You, as the biker, are instructed to reach the goal (the finish flag) and pick up any gear icons along the way (if there are any). You need to avoid the spikes and manouvre your way across/over/through the sometimes very challenging landscape.

Only the two wheels of the bike and the bikers head interact with their surroundings, so if you touch a spike with any of these you die, and if you touch the floor or the wall with your head you die as well. Gathering the gear icons and touching the finish must be done with the wheels or the biker’s head as well.

Main screen and Options

From the main screen, you can start the game but we’ll skip that for a little while and start with the Options. You can choose to draw clouds in the sky and draw other objects in the landscape. Turn these off to have a less cluttered view and maybe a bit speedier gameplay. However, since the game is a few years old already I don’t find that changing these settings impact my gameplay in any other way that providing some graphical extra’s.

Sounds can be enabled and as always it is disabled for me. The Level skin is quite fun, because it lets you complete change the theme of the game. By default you are a biker in a normal environment, but you can change this to ride in a nuclear area and even as Santa Claus in a polar area. The actual levels stay the same, they just look completely different.

If you enable Practice mode, you can touch the walls and floor with your head. This makes it easier to find your way through a level and get to know where all the objects are, but of course this is not the mode you should play in when you seriously want to play your way through the levels.

From the Options screen you can continue to customize the keys with which you play. Here you immediately see that there are only a few controls: throttle and break, rotate left and right (actually these are: rotate clockwise and rotate counter-clockwise), and flip the player (this will switch the front and end of the bike so that the front wheel becomes the back wheel). Finally there is a Pause button.

Next up in the main screen is the Player section. You can create additional player accounts so that your friends can play the game as well, or you can just create a new account to replay and unlock all the levels all over again. A problem here is that you cannot remove an account so don’t create too many. You can register online on motogear.mobirate.com to post your highscores but I never care about such features so I didn’t try this. Those highscores are also available from the Main screen (“Best Bikers”) and so are the replays you save after finishing a level (you can record it and watch it later). I don’t spend any time on these extra’s because the game itself is too addicting.

Finally there is also some documentation built in so that you can read the necessary information without the need of some online help manual.

Start Game

Pressing the Start Game button is what you’ll want to do after setting up the Options to your liking. Here you can pick a level pack and start a level. There are three level packs included, offering well over 100 levels. But the best part is that Elastomania levels are also supported by Motogear! This means that the hundreds (thousands!) of custom levels that are designed by Elastomania players, can be imported to Motogear so that you will never run out of new levels for this game. (Well technically you could, but you’d need to give up your day job to play Motogear THAT much I think). A good place to start looking for custom levels is here. If you add up all numbers on that page there should be around 40,000 custom levels available on the sites linked from there. To import the custom levels you can use the Motogear Utility, or you can create custom levels yourself using the advanced level editor, both available here. However, you can also simply create a “Maps” folder in the Motogear installation folder and copy/paste your custom levels to that folder.

Anyway, back to Motogear. After selecting the level pack, you’ll get to a list of levels. Only the levels you’ve unlocked are displayed (except for the custom user levels, they are all unlocked right from the start). You need to finish a level to unlock the next level. However, there is a also a “Skip” button that you can press after losing a life. When you skip a level you just start the next one, and you can come back to finish a previous level at any time. You can skip a total of five levels, so once you’ve done that you need to go back and finish an older unfinished level in order to get another “Skip”. There are a few very hard levels in the included packs so while you should be able to get to the end of each pack after enough playing, don’t expect to finish it all without having skipped a small handful of levels. Unfinished levels are indicated with an (X) after the name so they are easily identifiable.

Playing the game

Well actually there’s not a lot to tell here. You know the controls that can be used, you know the goals you need to meet. Apart from that you’d need to download a trial and check out the levels. Here’s just one example of an obstacle you need to get across.

At the bottom there is a small representation of the level so that you can see where the gear icons are (red dots) and where the finish is (one of the two green dots: one is you, the other is the finish). The previous level is rather easy and can be finished with only a few tries. The one below is a lot more trickier though. At the left you see in the minimap that you need to get two gear icons and then get to the finish in the small gap in the bottom right. There are several hard objectives here. The first jump to get the first gear icon is though already but it can’t be captured on a single screenshot. I’ve decided to show you the second gear icon (the second screenshot). You need to ride on your back wheel and get your front wheel over the obstacle to the left. Then your front wheel needs to lower but not too much because that will cause you to hit the spikes. While doing this manouvre you need to keep your balance: if you fall backwards and land on your head you need to start again. After getting the two gear icons you need to make your way back to the center of the level and fall through the gap to the finish. However, this gaps gets more and more narrow, and it will not be easy to keep your balance. Very often one wheel is a bit below the other, or you’re not falling straight down. If this happens, you’ll turn and your head will hit the wall either on the left or on the right.

I suggest you give this game a try. You might not like the genre at all, that’s fine. However, if you like the stunts combined with the precise movement and balance, this is a game that can easily be expanded upon by adding the numerous available levels.

Game information

The product page of Mobirate Motogear is here.
Download a trial or the level editor/utility here.
The current version is 1.40 and I don’t expect any updates.
Motogear costs $ 9,95 directly from Mobirate. However, it’s just $ 4,95 from Clickgamer here.
Honesly I think $ 4,95 is almost nothing when you realize how many levels can be added for free after just downloading them from one of the Elastomania level sites. Motogear is a great game, but a key part of why I like it so much is that it can be expanded with more levels than I can probably handle.

It has been quite some time now since I last updated the Today Screen page. My last post was in April and after that I took out the iLauncher today screen plugin out of PocketBreeze for a while, placing it at the total bottom of the screen so I had one row of icons in my launcher.

However, in the past few weeks I’ve found a great little utility called BatteryStatus . (There is an XDA-developers thread about it here.) The basic, free version is already quite customizable and allows you to show all kinds of information on your Today screen and incorporate other Today screens as well. The Advanced edition (currently in beta!) allows for a lot more tweaking, though. You do need to ’code’ your skin yourself by using .xml but there are also quite some skins available (here) so you might be able to take advantage of those as well.

So what di I use BatteryStatus for? Not for the top two plugins, they are just the default calendar and tasks plugins that you can enable in Start > Settings > Today > Items.  But the two rows with all kinds of device information and the launcher below do come from BatteryStatus.

The two rows of information tell me all the important things that I often want to see quickly. It starts with the battery meter. BatteryStatus can also place a little battery percentage under the clock in the title bar, but on my device it is still buggy. It never updates, so while my my actual battery percentage is 89%, the percentage under the clock still shows 100% (from my latest soft-reset when the device was connected to the charger). To the right of that is the amount of MB I’ve used on my data connection. I’ve got a 25MB limit on my monthly contract but there’s a trick for Orange customers in the Netherlands to work around that. Orange knows this but ignores it as long as not too many people take advantage of it. So I basically do have unlimited data, but I still do want to keep an eye on my data usage. The last item on the first row shows the amount of unread RSS items in Ilium Software Newsbreak. BatteryStatus can show registry values so I simply looked up the value of unread RSS items in the Newsbreak registry section and tell BatteryStatus to show it on my screen. If I tap the “RSS: 4″ section, NewsBreak is opened.

The second row starts with a meter of my internal storage space. Normally I have just above 99MB free but at the moment there’s a .cab file in the My Documents folder, occupying a few MB’s. The last item in this section of BatteryStatus is an SMS counter which tells me the amount of sent text messages this month. Both the data counter and the SMS counter are reset every month on the 27th day of the month. (BatteryStatus allows you to customize the reset dates).

The row at the bottom (well, halfway down actually, there’s a large gap in the bottom half of my Today screen) is a launcher. I’ve got about 10 items in them and I can use my finger to scroll through the list horizontally. I simply tap an item to open the program.

BatteryStatus requires quite some work if you have never worked with .xml before (like me) but if you put your will to it, you can get quite some things done. I really don’t know if this will stay on my screen as long as the PocketBreeze + iLauncher combination did. However, I’ve been using this layout for a few weeks already now and that is longer that I expected. I would love for BatteryStatus to give me some more information about my Tasks and I’d love to have a working battery meter on my top bar, but besides that this current layout is quite good!

All you need to do is become a Club Astraware member, which is free. You get monthly discounts, and you get points for your purchases with which you can save for even more discounts.

I’m a happy Club Astraware member and today I’ve become an even more happier member, since I just registered and downloaded Big Box of Blox for free.

Club Astraware website is here.
Big Box of Blox website is here.

And the press release is after the break!